NY Times Student Deaths Article “A Disgrace” – What should have been a straight-ahead story of the accidental deaths of six young Irish students here on J-1 student work visas was badly botched by the New York Times last month. In the Times story of the collapse of an apartment balcony in California that killed the six students and badly hurt seven others, the Times focused on student partying and the “raucous life in a college town at night” before it moved onto the lead: the tragic loss of life of students who were celebrating a twenty-first birthday party on a balcony possibly flawed in its construction. The possibility that there were faulty materials in the balcony that had been further weakened by weather and overcrowding is also being investigated.

Not only did the story essentially and cruelly overpower the fact of the deaths of the young students by citing two incidents elsewhere with other students that zeroed in on wrecked apartments and visiting student misbehavior, but it also went on to call the J-1 visa program “a source of embarrassment for Ireland.” This surely comes as news to the Irish government and program officials who have been fully supportive of the program links with Boston and other US cities.

Back in the 1990s, I worked with scores of students on work-study programs that came to Boston from Irish venues, north and south, nationalist and unionist. They came from Belfast, Dublin, Derry, Letterkenny, and other places. The students were welcomed into the homes of Boston-area host families and split their duty schedules between relevant college courses and work that reflected their future work specialities. In all the time I ran these programs we had just one young man who was sent home early. He had come to the states from Ireland with a drug addiction problem and returned home for medical attention. In the main, these were great young people, eager, curious, hardworking, and a credit,to Ireland and their respective programs. I loved working with those young people.

The New York Times apologized for its misguided coverage of the balcony tragedy following a barrage of critical stories about the report. The article, however, remained for a time on the newspaper’s website.

I recall writing in a previous column about a San Francisco apartment that was wrecked by several J-1 visa student renters. What I recall well was a media follow-up to that San Francisco incident that detailed a number of students and other program participants showing up to work, volunteering and actively cleaning, repairing, and repainting the wrecked apartment, in essence apologizing for the bad behavior of  program colleagues who did the damage and had returned to Ireland.

That important “good news” aftermath of the San Francisco apartment assault was not mentioned in the Times article. A negligent omission!  Ireland and the young people who come here representing Ireland north and south deserve far better at the hand of one of America’s most prestigious journals.

Good News from Sundance for “The Peacemaker” – Padraig O’Malley is the “Peacemaker and James Demo the director of the documentary film that chronicles the five-year struggle to get O’Malley’s amazing odyssey onto film and into theaters. The update from director Demo is that “The Peacemaker” has been selected to work with the 2015 Sundance Documentary Edit and Story Lab.  This is a real plus for Cambridge director James Demo and Professor O’Malley.

Demo reports: “This is an incredible opportunity for us to work on the film with some of the most accomplished and talented people working in documentary film today.” He went on to thank the backers who have generously supported the film. “We would not have been able,” he says, “to keep working these past months – to get the film ready in time – without our Kickstarter backers.”

The Kickstarter program is part of what is referred to as crowdfunding, a collection of more than 1,000 websites that enable entrepreneurs or anyone with an idea or a product to conduct online pledge drives. According to Parade magazine, “internet users annually spend some $10 billion to help bring new ideas to life.”  In addition to “The Peacemaker,” Kickstarter funded more than 22,000 ideas in 2014 while creating 270,000 jobs along the way.

Bertie, Far from Leinster House, Raps Lenihan – You can take former Taoiseach Bertie Ahern out of his familiar surroundings at Government Building, but you can’t make him forget his old enemies, dead and gone may they be. In a new documentary, Bertie, who worked closely with Brian Lenihan when the latter served as finance minister during the height of Ireland’s horrific financial crisis, has a few less-than-choice words to say about his onetime colleague, who bore the brunt of Ahern’s bristling leadership style as he was fighting and losing a lethal battle with cancer four years ago.

On the program, Bertie, who never liked sharing the limelight, unwrapped his personal distaste for Lenihan, saying “He was difficult, to be honest. I’ve seen it over the years – the more intellectual they are, the more work they don’t want to do.” Maybe, one might suggest, it was the terminal cancer that sapped his strength.

The political commentator Olivia O’Leary was quoted in the Irish Independent as saying of Ahern: [He] didn’t like Brian Lenihan, he didn’t like the fact that Brian played Wagner in the car and knew about art.”

You can’t put words in someone’s mouth, but given the heroic two-front battle that Brian Lenihan was waging in the last days of his life – his cancer and his central role in protecting Ireland’s fiscal credibility – it would not be inconceivable that Bertie Ahern might throw a bouquet or two to the deceased and his family. But, apparently, any grudge, no matter how petty, is fair game for comment when you’re king of the Northside, with an obscenely fat pension and scores still to be settled.

The North is Undergoing Stormy Times – On the political front, there is a growing consensus that the state structures in Northern Ireland are foundering, chiefly over the unfinished business of welfare reform and an increasing crescendo of disaffection by leaders there. Everywhere one looks at the troubled North there are calls to do something to resolve the destructive status quo.
America’s special peace envoy, Gary Hart, has warned Northern leaders that US. investment in Northern Ireland is conditional on political progress. The former US senator is bluntly saying that US patience with the North’s politics is “fast running out.”  Ireland’s Foreign Affairs Minister, Charlie Flanagan, has voiced serious fears that the North’s institutions are near the brink of collapse. “There is a great risk that the current impasse will result in the collapse of the institutions which would be very grave and serious,” he said.

Added to the gathering instability is the heightened concern that Martin McGuinness, the North’s Deputy First Minister, might resign and bring down the Stormont self-rule government if Britain takes back powers over the welfare issue. That is a very real possibility, insiders concede.

In a late June meeting of the British-Irish Council in Dublin, First Minister Peter Robinson warned that unless the December welfare reform agreement is implemented in relatively short time, the Northern assembly would have no future. Sinn Fein has backed off earlier commitments to tough welfare cuts, with McGuinness saying he wants to see the Stormont House Agreement implemented but conceding that difficulties remain, pointing to the Tory-led welfare cuts in the North over the past four years.  Stay tuned.

Notable Quote
“Let me put it in context. I just said:  ‘Had there been no Paisley, would there have been the Troubles?’  Probably not. That is not the same as saying that he caused the Troubles. That’s not  saying that [Paisley] bears a unique blame for it. ... I’m saying that he was a very significant factor in creating them. To go back to the very start: Who were the people responsible for all the bombings in 1968, the bombings of the power supplies and all the rest of it?  They were Paisleyites.”
– David Trimble, former Ulster Unionist Party leader,

1988 Nobel Peace Prize joint recipient with John Hume.
                                                
Wall Street Journal Overstates Cost of Fed Regulations – The Wall Street Journal, which prides itself on getting it right in news stories, failed badly on editorials describing federal regulations as being a “hidden tax” costing trillions, with each US household pitching in $15,000 every year. The WSJ, using questionable sources that the Washington Post Fact Checker described as “misleading” and “unbalanced, repeated the reportedly biased and hugely flawed charges for three years running, 2012-2015. These and other charges were revealed by Media Matters research and reported last month.

Other organizations such as Public Citizen, concurred with the research, calling the Wall Street Journal editorials on the subject “a terribly inaccurate and unrealistic guess.” NYU’s Michael Livermore said the editorials on federal regulations was“more an opinion piece than it is an analysis.”

The Journal editorials were based largely on annual reports by a conservative think tank called the Competitive Enterprise Institute. Hardly balanced journalism!

Major Travel Guide Lauds County Kerry – In its Best in Europe 2015, Lonely Planet, a respected and popular guide, described in glowing terms the Irish county we know as the Kingdom. In a listing of its Top 10 destinations to visit in Europe it ranked Kerry as a close second to Kent, England, and ahead of the Black Forest, Budapest, Ibiza, Spain, Normandy, and the Austrian Alps.

As a grandson of Kerry’s Flaherty clan, I have spent many memorable moments in the Kingdom, from the Killarney Lakes and the Ring of Kerry to North Kerry’s coastal scenic wonders like Ballybunion & Ballyheigue, and Bantry Bay in south Kerry.

Orange Order Opens East Belfast Museum – Former Irish President Mary McAleese was on hand last month for the official launch of the Orange order’s new interpretive centre, or museum, at Belfast’s Schomberg House. McAleesed spoke briefly but candidly about the differences culturally between herself and her family and the Orange Order: “We haven’t always shared this space...this island happily with each other; we have decided we want to share it happily for the future.”

Those, and others, were generous, healing words by the former president and maybe they will generate the type of good will and understanding that neighbors should share, but it will take a giant leap of trust for Catholics – myself included – to warm up to the traditionally virulent anti-Catholic stance championed by the Protestant Order.

The Orangemen, especially their leadership, want the Order to move into the mainstream, to play a role in the benefits that come with tourism and in the marketing of the history and heritage of the Order, which was founded in 1795. Anti-papist sentiments reach far back into the origins of the Order, and its members have a somewhat dubious history of associating with loyalist paramilitary groups. There are many seemingly insurmountable obstacles to a genuine coming together, but a new era of enhanced respect and civility, if possible, can only help.

Loyalists and British Government Ties Strong – A television documentary by RTE outlines in often graphic detail the widespread collusion between loyalists in the North and British government security forces during the Thatcher years and beyond. The film, aired late last month, claims that a member of the loyalist gang responsible for the 1974 Monaghan and Dublin bombings that killed dozens said that the purpose was to start a civil war. The RTE film also features former police Ombudsman Naula O’Loan testifying that senior British government officials in 2003 attempted to pressure her into halting her investigation into newer murders involving collusion.

O’Loan’s investigation, reports the Belfast Telegraph review of the documentary, uncovered shocking levels of collusion between police officers and serial killers, and that Special Branch officers gave killers immunity and aided other murderers in escaping criminal charges.

The collusion was far wider than originally thought and involved the British Army, MI5 Intelligence, and the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) police.

Irish Flagship Aids Migrants in Mediterranean – Twice in less than 24 hours the Irish naval ship LE Eithne was in the right place at the right time, which was 30 miles off Libya in the Mediterranean where a boatload of seagoing migrants were saved by the Irish Navy. Some 300 people escaping from the Mideast war zone were taken onboard by the Eithne as they were trying to cross to safety in the south central section of the sea. Just a day earlier the Eithne reacted to a radio alert that there were five vessels in potential distress about 35 miles off the coast of North Africa. The Irish ship rescued some 200 migrants and got them safely to land.

RANDOM CLIPPINGS
 Boston College football returns to Ireland in September of 2016. This is the second Irish jaunt for the Eagles who will play Georgia Tech in Dublin’s Aviva Stadium on Sept. 3, 2016. … Maybe the exodus is slowing. Over half of those training to be doctors in Ireland plan to stay in Ireland and practice there. … The big news is Pope Francis’s climate encyclical, but notice that Francis has named an auditor general for the Vatican who will ride herd on the often casual fiscal affairs of the Holy See. … Joe Klein, Time magazine’s super columnist did a nice piece on former Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley, who is picking up some attention for his straight-talking campaign. Only 52, he’s sharp, experienced, and refreshing. … The hottest commodity in the airline business seems to be the Irish. Two Irishmen have moved from Ryanair and Aer Lingus to try to pull Malaysia Airlines out of its malaise. And British Airways recently hired another Irishman as their new CEO.

Ireland loves to tax the so-called sin products. Alcohol and tobacco are the most expensive in the EU. … Over the past five years there have been some 1,200 incidents of illegal fuel laundering and waste dumping from the North into wee Louth where officials have their hands full trying to protect Irish waterways. … Fox News, first in hyperbole and faux reports, has taken on the American poor as it aims to shame seniors and the disabled for not working. Shameless pandering to comfy listeners. … The critical question in Ireland today is: Will Irish workers overseas come home now that the employment crisis is easing. Irish recruiters are heading Down Under looking for job seekers wanting to come home. … One of our favorite fugitives struck out in a Boston bankruptcy court. Anglo’s David Drumm is doing some heavy lawyering up in hiring top legal talent Tracy Miner for his appeal. Meanwhile the Irish government is getting hot in its attempt to extradite Drumm.

Ireland, New Zealand, and Israel have has been designated a “stand out” digital countries by the Harvard Business journal. … Liam Neeson, busy making millions with derring-do movies, has called for the famous “Quiet Man” cottage in Maam, Connemara, to be restored to its former glory. … Belfast’s gifted singer, Van Morrison, has finally agreed to a knighthood which will happen when the next Queen’s honors comes around. He will turn 70 next month. … Lst month, the Dublin City Council came up with a plan to alter the city centre by restricting private cars and taxis to make it more useable for pedestrians. It would cost $165 million. … If you have a gift card ,or gift voucher, as they are called in Ireland, all the expiration dates  will be scrapped under a proposed reform of Irish consumer law. … Waterford-born academic Louise Richardson has been named the new vice-chancellor, or chief executive, of Oxford University, making her the first woman to  lead that institution. … “Stairwell,” a book of poems by Michael Longley, and “Blue Sonoma,” by Jane Munro have won the 2015 Griffin Poetry Prize in Toronto, each being worth $70,000. And ain’t it nice to see less struggling by deserving poets wherever.